Banshee Worm King: Book Five of the Oz Chronicles (7 page)

“Characters?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying I’m not real?”

“No, you are real.”
 
I stopped to gather my thoughts, to try to explain it to her in a way
she’d understand.
 
“We are all real...
most of us are, anyway.
 
We came from
outside the story.
 
The Storytellers put
us here.
 
They created this world we’re
trapped in.
 
They’ve written and drawn
every move we’ve made.”

She turned to me.
 
“Every move?”

“Exactly.”

She put her hands on my face.

“What are you doing?”

Without another word she leaned in and kissed me. A deep,
lingering kiss on the lips.
 
I struggled
at first, but the longer it lasted the less I objected.
 
Eventually she slowly pulled back.

“Did I do that or was that written by the Storytellers?”

I stared at her in shock for several seconds before giving
her a one-word answer.
 
“Storytellers.”

“You sure about that?”

I nodded.

“Then me trying to eat Gordy, that was the Storytellers,
too?”

“Yes.”

She let go of my face.
 
“Wow.
 
That makes me feel...”
 
She wiped a tear away from her face.
 
“That’s such a relief. It’s not my fault?”

“No, it’s not.”

She hugged me and then quickly released me.

I turned to the stares of everyone else in the room.
“What?”

Everyone but Lou looked away quickly. She held me in a
disapproving stare for a second or two before continuing her efforts to help
Gordy.

Wes sauntered over shaking his head and met me in the
center of the room.
 
“I said talk to her,
boy.
 
Didn’t say nothing about kissing
her.”

“She kissed me,” I said in protest.

“Maybe,” he said, “but you didn’t put up much of a fight.”

I attempted to explain myself without knowing what to
say.
 
Every time I got to the end of a
sentence I couldn’t think of the final word.
 
After the third or fourth attempt, I gave up and walked away.

Four

“The boy will be down for a while,” Bostic said sitting
down next to me on a homemade bar stool in the kitchen of the treehouse.
 
The kitchen was an open space with an island
in the middle that had a stove top and sink.
 
It looked modern, but the stove was wood burning, and the faucet was a
small pump that brought in water from a tank and filtration system on the roof
of the house.
 
“It’ll be touch and go for
the next twelve hours or so.
 
Me and the
girl treated as much of the infected area as we could.”

The girl, Lou, had moved to the other side of the
room.
 
She didn’t want to have anything
to do with me except shoot me the occasional evil eye.

“He’ll make it,” I said.

Bostic sat up straight on the stool, his eyes scanning my
face.
 
“Can’t figure you out.”

“There’s nothing to figure.”

“No, there is.
 
You’re a kid, but you ain’t.
 
You
understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not trying to.”

“You’re like this old man trapped in a young man’s body.”

My mind flooded with images of the facility.
 
It took everything I had to let them pass
without screaming my head off.
 
“I’m just
a kid.
 
Seen things I shouldn’t
have.
 
Done things I shouldn’t have.
 
But I’m still just a kid.”

He folded his arms and leaned back, stretching a kink out
of his neck.
 
“Maybe.
 
Kind of think there’s more to it, but in the
end, it don’t matter, does it?”

“No.
 
It
doesn’t.”
  

“You know what does matter?”

I shook my head.

“That you not lead these people down a primrose path to
nowhere.”

I rolled my eyes and let out a growl.
 
“Are you going to tell me how to lead,
too?
 
Ever since this whole thing started
everyone’s chimed in whenever they can about how I should lead.
 
I didn’t ask to lead anyone or anything.
 
You think I want this?
 
You’re nuts!
 
You ever consider that I’m not really leading anyone at all?
 
You ever think that maybe everyone’s just
following me because they’re afraid to step up and be a leader themselves?
 
You ever think of that?”

“You got me wrong, kid,” Bostic said.
 
“I ain’t here to tell you how to lead.
 
I’m here to tell you how not to lead.
 
You got these people thinking that everything
is going to be just fine and dandy if you all keep your heads down and keep
moving forward.
 
You got to settle their
minds on the fact that things ain’t good.”

“You want me to take away their hope?”

“Ain’t saying that.
 
I’m saying you need to give them something else to hope for.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because when I told you that it was going to be touch and
go for your friend Gordy, all you said is that he’ll make it without
considering the possibility he won’t.”

“So?”

“So, I’m telling you flat out that there’s more of a chance
he won’t make it than he will.
 
You need
to get off your hero ass and clear your head of all the
rah-rah-everything-will-be-all-right crap and prepare the others for the real
possibility that he’ll check out sometime in the night.”

I peered past him and watched Gordy sleep on his cot.
 
His chest was rising and falling with each
breath and his body twitched every once in awhile.

“The worst thing you can do is let him pass without giving
them a chance to get right with it first.”

“You want me to give up on Gordy, my best friend?”

“I want you to do the right thing.
 
Even if it’s the last thing you want to do.”

I clenched my fists and ran through what he said in my
mind.
 
I was tired of doing the right
thing.
 
The right thing was way harder
than doing nothing at all. Nothing was good.
 
If I did nothing, what happens, happens.
 
No one could get mad at me for that or hate me for telling them that
their friend was going to die.
 
“You
don’t understand.” My voice cracked.
 
I
was about to lose it.
 
“Gordy and me grew
up together.
 
I don’t know him because of
this world.
 
I know him because we went
to school together.
 
Always have, ever
since we were old enough to go to school.
 
If he dies, I won’t have anything that keeps me from forgetting...” I
couldn’t say another word, not without blubbering like a baby.

Bostic put his hand on my shoulder.
 
“Forgetting is the best thing you can do.”

I bowed my head and avoided eye contact with him.
 

He patted me on the back and stood.
 
“I’ll throw together some grub.
 
Won’t be fancy, but it will be stuff to put
in your belly.”

I twisted in my stool and looked at Lou.
 
What was the sense in remembering the way
things used to be?
 
I wasn’t going
back.
 
I couldn’t. I’d lose Lou. I wasn’t
going to let that happen.

I stood and slowly made my way to her.
 
“You got a minute?”

She shrugged and turned away. “Maybe April does.”

“That wasn’t what you think it was.”

“I don’t think it was anything because I don’t think about
it.”

“She kissed me.”

“You looked like you were enjoying it.”

“I was being polite.”

She groaned.

“Look, I’m not really interested in talking about
that.
 
I want to talk about Gordy.”

She folded her arms in front of her chest.
 
“What about him?”

I cleared my throat and searched for a dozen different ways
to say he’s dying, but nothing sounded right.
 
“Bostic says he’s sick.”

“You need Bostic to tell you that?”

“Lou, listen.
 
He
says he’s really sick.
 
Sick, sick.”

She tilted her head and furrowed her brow.
 
“He’s sick.
 
That’s it.
 
He’s going to get
better.”

“How do you know?”

She sneered. “I just know.”

“Bostic says different.”

“Bostic’s a stranger.
 
He doesn’t know Gordy.
 
He doesn’t
know what he’s capable of.”

I squatted down next to her.
 
“We need to prepare ourselves for the
possibility that he won’t get better.”

“Shut up,” she said loud enough to attract attention from the
others lounging on the other side of the kitchen.
 
“Don’t say that.”

“Lou...”

“No, we cannot lose someone else. We’ve lost too many.
 
We lost Pepper.
 
We lost Archie and Billy.
 
We lost...” she covered her mouth with her
hand and squeaked out, “Valerie,” before she broke down in tears.
 

I attempted to pull her in for a hug but she shoved me
back, almost knocking me to the floor.
 

“You’re trying to quit.”

I shook my head.
 
“I
don’t know what that means.”

“You’ve given up.”

“He’s dying...”

“No,” she said with a bark.
 
“I’m not talking about Gordy.
 
You’ve given up on everything.
 
You’ve changed.”

I almost laughed.
 
“Who hasn’t changed?”

“I haven’t!”
 
She
screamed so loud it made my ears ring.

The others looked more frightened than I had ever seen
them, and I had seen them in some pretty scary situations.

Wes approached.
 
“You
two got a real lively conversation going on here.”

I stood.
 
“Yeah,
well, it’s just a misunderstanding.”

“Tell Wes what you told me,” Lou said.

“I don’t think so,” I said walking away.

I heard Lou say, “He thinks Gordy’s going to die.”

I shot Bostic an angry look as I passed through the
kitchen.
 
He smiled back brightly as if
he had won some great prize.

I stopped and stood in the doorway leading out to the open
air deck.
 
The night was brisk.
 
I was burning up from the argument with Lou
so the passing breeze felt good.
 
It
occurred to me that I was unnaturally hot after that exchange.
 
The Délon in me was clearly still trying to
work its way to the surface.

I stuck my head out and looked up into the forest canopy
for any signs of the sadistic monkey creature that had attacked us on the other
platform.
 
It was nowhere to be seen. But
the way it moved through the trees, I was fairly certain it could come from out
of nowhere to pick up where it had left off.

I heard a muffled woof and turned towards it.
 
Kimball was on the edge of the deck focused
on the ground below.
 
I joined him eager
to see what he found so interesting.

The Banshee worms were surfacing and submerging back
underground over and over again.
 
It was
almost like watching a school of fish swimming in circles at the surface of the
water.
 

“Feeding grounds,” I said patting Kimball on the head.

He barked. I took it to mean he was glad we were up
here.
 

I turned to go back inside but stopped short when I saw it
standing at the other end of the deck.
 
The thing that I thought was a monkey wasn’t a monkey, not
completely.
 
It stood on two legs and
brown fuzz covered its gray flesh.
 
Its
arms were incredibly long and it held them out in front like a praying
mantis.
 
A row of eyes circled its bald
white head and strings of mucus stretched across its hideous mouth.
 
It only stood four feet tall, but I had no interest
in getting any closer to it.